“Disastrous to Take a Single Note”: Memory and Materiality in a Century of U.S. Journalism Textbooks

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I examine the highly contested professional discourse around journalistic notetaking through 125 years of U.S. reporting textbooks, exploring how professional practices have been presented, rationalized, and justified in succeeding eras of modern journalism. Analyzing through a cultural lens and material theories of “objects of journalism,” the study offers insight into developing perceptions of journalists’ ethical obligations to accuracy, presumed audience expectations for journalistic content, and the capacities of human memory. Analysis suggests that rather than resolving questions of whether and how journalists should take notes, reporting textbooks offered ambivalent, unrealistic, and contradictory advice through much of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• discourse
• interviewing
• journalism practice
• materialism
• notetaking
• objects of journalism
• textbooks

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All the President’s Men depicts an impressive range of approaches to sources and notetaking, corresponding to numerous textbook scenarios in this study.

2 It’s acknowledged here that nearly all textbooks, particularly before the late twentieth century, take the masculine subject as the assumed reporter or source.